I started a new job in October, so now's the time to relfect on the first 2 months here.
What can I say about this role? It's global remote, as in my coworkers are all fully remote and spread out across US (largest contigent), Taiwan, and Europe (smallest group), to support a follow the sun on call model, at least during business hours. It's SRE, but more domain specific / frontline ops heavy compared to my past platform SRE roles.
It's at a financial institution, which means on call is taken... much more seriously compared to my past places. This does put me in a bit of a bind, as I need to work with the US based people to get work reviewed and in, but I can't easily shift my working hours on account of being on call for European business hours. Also, the company appears to have picked up all the ceremony of the open source ecosystem, but not really any of the benefits, so a change that took 30min to make can take days to get into production (repos, reviews, versioning, etc...).
The specific domain: running blockchain nodes, brings with it some unique challenges. These run as part of a distributed network with nodes run by different operators. You really have... limited options in managing performance, after all you need to keep up with the current consensus of the network to do anything, and you can't load shed.
We shall see if I manage to accomplish anything here.